pavane -

By way of minor consolation, I can suggest that it's still less hassle than SCSI, which is probably the nearest second cousin to USB. They don't pronounce it Scuzzy entirely because that's what the acronym looks like.

Many USB devices work fine off a generic hookup. Quite a few cameras seem to need "device specific drivers" to be able to read their memory cards reliably. Once you install the camera software, the machine has the right driver, and memory cards from that camera usually will work okay in another USB reader.

A different brand of memory card should work okay; but if a particular card is giving you trouble, most cameras do allow you to format a card. It's possible that reformatting in the camera the card that causes a problem might help, although I can't offer any citations on that.

One CRITICAL step with any USB device that needs a "special" driver is that the DRIVER MUST BE INSTALLED BEFORE THE DEVICE IS PLUGGED IN FOR THE FIRST TIME. If you plug in before the right driver is in place, Windows PnP will hook a generic driver to it, and you'll have to uninstall the port(s) and start over to get it right.

As mentioned, many older machines have more than one jack/connector attached to a single port. This is theoretically permissible, but often doesn't work as advertised. A USB HUB connected to the machine, with all the USB devices connected to the hub, often works better if the machine has "shared ports."

Another "permissible" setup that often doesn't work well is mixing old USB and USB-2 devices on the same connection. USB-2 devices usually are capable of dropping back to USB-1 speed, if there are USB-1 devices on the system, but often they don't work as cleanly when forced to do so. Unless you've updated it, the Win98 machine probably doesn't have a USB2 port, which might explain some of the differences between the two machines.

I've had little trouble with USB connections. One inkjet printer, one flatbed scanner, and two external hard drives as fixed connections through a 4-port switching hub, and the camera and/or a couple of card readers intermittently direct to my WinXP machine. The workhorse Laser printer is on the ethernet LAN, which also connects to "her" Win2K machine with a multipurpose printer/scanner and an external hard drive both on USB with no separate hub. Possible the thing that keeps the system clean is that all of the USB devices are the same USB-2 variety(?).

John